On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 at 11:30, Andrew Deng via Talk-ca <talk-ca@openstreetmap.org> wrote: > Hello, I believe Yonge Street in Toronto and York Region (Regional Road 1) > should be tagged as highway=primary rather than highway=secondary as it is > tagged now. > Here are some reasons I believe why: > 1) Yonge Street is considered the "Main Street" of Toronto, Thornhill, > Richmond Hill, and Aurora. It is also a major road in Newmarket. > 2) It is a major thoroughfare throughout the route. In Toronto, the Yonge > subway follows it and in York Region, Viva bus lanes are being built. It also > connects to Bradford in the north.> 3) It was a former Ontario King's Highway > - Highway 11. Some other former King's Highways in the Toronto/York area are > tagged as highway=primary, such as Highway 27, Highway 7, and Highway 48.
Hi Andrew, hi mailing list, I've been thinking about this for a while. Thanks for bringing this up! I'd like to contribute to a wider discussion about tagging primary in Ontario, particularly in urban and suburban areas. I think we should use it more - here's why. I've been unhappy for a while with the tagging guidelines for Ontario roads. The primary/secondary/tertiary OSM scheme originated in the UK, where basically all "A-roads" are primary (or trunk) and all "B-roads" are secondary. This is a UK-wide scheme and a crucial point is that there are still A-roads in busy urban areas. For example what is by GTA standards a narrow street in inner city like https://osm.org/way/327282307 (one-way, 1 or at most 2 lanes) is primary because it's an A road. [1] Many other regions in Europe also use primary for urban thoroughfares with frequent cross streets. For a long time, the Canadian tagging guidelines were a very close copy of the UK scheme - check out Danny's wiki edit in May 2019 [2] that removed very UK-like references to "C roads" (a UK classification) and "a suburb" ("An example would be the main roads within the suburb to get to the local primary school", "A highway=residential road which is used for accessing or moving between private residential properties (homes). Otherwise called a 'suburb'."), and removed a statement that primary, secondary, and tertiary roads are "all maintained by the provincial governments, with provincial jurisdiction." https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence still specifies that in Canada, a highway=primary is a "Provincial primary highway that does not meet freeway standards". That might work in BC, where there are provincial highways in downtown Vancouver, but it doesn't work in Ontario. BC Highway 99 through downtown Vancouver is tagged as trunk, and it is no wider than Yonge through York Region tagged as secondary. Historically, in Ontario, the maintenance and jurisdiction of a road has more to do with whether a lower-level government could be strong-armed into accepting ownership in the 1990s than with its actual role in the road network. Ontario government downloaded the roads it could onto the regions and cities, but of course the volume of traffic or significance of the road doesn't change just because we enter a somewhat-built-up area (or it increases). There's some good examples along Highway 7 entering east Kitchener and east Guelph. Highways 8 and 24 entering south Cambridge are more examples - it's just a cut at point of jurisdiction change, it's got nothing to do with the actual road or its use. As a result, we don't really show the main roads in Ontario cities. We mostly jump from a freeway straight to secondary, and most exceptions are recent changes. To an extent a grid system, which most Ontario cities use, does of course consist of a number of fairly equal arterials, but natural obstacles often get in the way, and so in Toronto/GTA some arterials are more equal than others. Is every grid street really the same rank? When everything is secondary, what really is secondary? To give some examples, in Toronto Lake Shore Blvd is clearly a busier road and can carry more inter-local traffic than Church or Yonge downtown, yet currently they're all secondary. Adelaide and Richmond are the designated through corridors - consider especially their direct connection to the DVP. Given the choice, you should be driving on Adelaide/Richmond, not on Queen - they are designed for this. Yet again, Queen, Adelaide, and Richmond are currently all secondary. Until last year, York Region's Highway 7 was being indicated the same secondary as Dundas Street next to Dundas Square (because after all, Hwy 7 was downloaded). They are clearly not even close to being the same category - which would you rather walk along? which would you rather drive 10 km along? Same with Highway 27 [3]. Provincial ownership gives us more curious examples. Check out the official provincial Highway 7: https://osm.org/relation/4114735 (and see dissenting view below for tagging of the non-classified parts). In Thorold, there is a short stretch of primary connnecting five secondary roads and one primary road, and the primary road isn't where most of the traffic goes. It is mapped as primary because it's provincially owned, because the provincial government couldn't convince anyone this road has a "local purpose": behold the entire extent of King's Highway 20 https://osm.org/relation/4115046 By ruling out primary because the province doesn't maintain the roads, we are limiting ourselves to only 3 grades of road (secondary, tertiary, residential). That's not really enough. Taking downtown Toronto for an example: - St. David Street is residential - Shuter Street is longer, connects more streets, so it gets tertiary - Queen Street is longer still, it crosses the river while Shuter doesn't, so it gets secondary - Lake Shore Blvd is more of a thoroughfare than Queen - you'd much rather have through trucks on Lake Shore than on Queen - but it's currently also secondary, because primary is reserved. This seems to me unsatisfactory. Toronto's own classification [4] has 4 grades for non-access-controlled roads above "laneway", and realistically they need at least a 5th grade as the classification doesn't really square with reality anymore [5]. For the record, for a dissenting view on giving non-provincial roads secondary there were https://osm.org/changeset/52697688 and https://osm.org/changeset/52690461 by BlueJaysFan86 in October 2017, supporting using secondary where the province doesn't own the road (province instead calls it a "Connecting Link"). See also discussion between Kevin and Danny about grid roads in Peel last August in https://osm.org/changeset/71184812 . I don't know Ottawa roads well, but just to note there are several roads tagged as primary there that don't appear to be provincially owned, and it seems to work fairly well. My question would then be: since provincial ownership is not that useful in built-up areas, what criteria can we use for making road primary vs secondary? Carrying through traffic might be one; but the given example of Yonge connecting to Bradford somewhat backfires since a trip from Aurora to Bradford is likely easier via the 400. It might end up being a smell test or a duck test ("it feels like a major road") or by ranking ("it's more important than this secondary, which is more important than this tertiary"). Maybe there are some objective categories like city traffic counts - though those aren't really verifiable (in OSM sense). I have some example suggestions to give an idea of what I would generally suggest: * (downloaded) Highway 7 in east Kitchener primary to Conestoga * I don't know Guelph, but I doubt through traffic westbound on (downloaded) Hwy 7 goes through its downtown - make the designated route primary * Smith Street and George Street through Arthur, ON along (downloaded) Hwy 6 upgraded to primary; similarly Harriston, Listowel, Mitchell, Seaforth, etc * in Toronto, Lake Shore Boulevard as primary from Humber Gardiner ramps to Coxwell, then Coxwell and all of Kingston Road (this is the signed truck route) * Jarvis Street and Mount Pleasant Road also primary (a decade ago we basically had a mayoral election about this being a major road ;) ) * Richmond and Adelaide primary between Bathurst and DVP ramps * Parkside/Keele/Weston Road primary to Black Creek Drive * perhaps Eglinton as primary east of 427 * downgrade some lesser roads to tertiary, like Church, Horner, The Westway, Pharmacy, Nugget, Oakwood * downgrade Markham Road (former Hwy 48) to secondary, at least south of 401, perhaps south of 407 I also had these on an earlier draft, it looks like it's been done and no one seems to have objected: * Black Creek Drive primary to Eglinton (no pedestrians, max 70) * Hwy 27 between 427 and Rexdale to primary or even trunk In the specific example of Yonge Street, the same treatment from Lake Ontario to Bradford does not to me seem appropriate, since there's many different stretches - some are main street, some are highway, some abutting big-box clusters, and many others. Is it really all that different from Bathurst Street, for instance? Perhaps both Yonge and Bathurst could be primary, but then so would all other grid arterials like Dufferin, Keele, Jane, etc. Actually you can see a preview of how this would look like by looking at Chicago, or by using the German style tiles [6] (German tiles map secondary roads with the orange colour that the main OSM.org map now uses for primary). I wouldn't be hugely opposed - these roads are more widely used and thus arguably more important as roads than most provincial highways outside the GTA - but we'd need consensus to that effect. Any thoughts welcome! --Jarek [1] though this is beginning to slowly crack where legal classification of the road does not match actual local conditions, see e.g https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2019-July/023221.html [2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Canadian_tagging_guidelines&type=revision&diff=1852915&oldid=1570882 [3] https://osm.org/way/23310641/history - initially made secondary because "this is not a provincial highway" https://osm.org/changeset/14554308 [4] https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/traffic-management/road-classification-system/about-the-road-classification-system/ and https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/9072-TS_RCS_2019-City-Wide.pdf [5] Toronto's current classification has a lot of narrow 40 km/h downtown streets as "major arterial" when their own description specifies 50-60 km/h and "Subject to access controls"; it requires no truck restrictions on "minor arterial" but there are definitely some truck restrictions on some roads classed as minor arterials [6] https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html#?zoom=12&lat=43.7331&lon=-79.41102&layers=B000TF _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
